Articoolo tries its hand at writing a Tedium topic
Earlier this week, I wrote about light beer, a topic that has the benefit (like many Tedium topics) of being simultaneously incredibly common and somewhat obscure.
My piece covered the way light beer is produced, and touched upon some of its early marketing.
I asked Articoolo to write me a short article about it, and here's what it gave me, with no edits for grammar. Drumroll, please …
They're appealing girls which have the features to boost the number 1 marketing light beer in the world. They get paid on average $30 each hour to speak about the Brands characteristics. Beer Girl Qualities Beer women are sexy and fun women that men love to be around. They're able to command the attention of the bar and get men to practically do whatever they need. Girls talk about the characteristics of their beer and amuse the pub guest by handing out promotional items like bottle openers and beer bracelets. Beer women are envied by other women and wanted by nearly every guy in the bar.
They're continuously posing for the camera and signing cards when they're encouraging bud light at special events. These promotional models get paid a ton of cash per hour. They could make any where from $25 to $40 each hour depending on what state they're encouraging in. Suggestions to Become a Bud Light Girl you'll find specific promotional and advertising services that employ their women to do Beer Promotions. Beer Distributors will even hire and use women they find locally. It might appear difficult for most women to become beer girls since a lot of girls are signing up to encourage beers.
Here are 4 Must do if you desire an opportunity at becoming a drink promotional model. You've to be capable to socialize and make people have a wonderful time. You should be appealing and exude confidence without being unapproachable.
As you can see, the piece struggled a bit to focus on my suggested subject of light beer, instead spending nearly all of its time discussing what it's like to be a paid marketing model at a bar, something I've always wanted to be.
Adding keywords to the mix to make it more specifically about light beer's history, or using more narrow terms like "bud light advertising," seemed to give the machine fits—it rejected my topics as too narrow, suggesting other ideas instead.
It did give me something for Miller Lite, but it's clear Articoolo's robot has a one-track mind on this topic. "Miller lite women are sexy, fun and thrilling girls to be around," the unintentionally chauvinistic algorithm wrote.
(As a test, I gave it a slightly broader term, "Nintendo Entertainment System," and it did a better job factually—highlighting Nintendo's history as a playing card manufacturer and correctly calling Nintendo "among the best video game businesses the world has ever seen." Click here to read the full piece.)
One of the company's other tools, a title generator, was more successful. After throwing in my link, it suggested the headline "Light Beer Is The Stuff That Pays For Sports Bars And Super Bowls," a quip I hadn't considered as a headline, but makes sense as one. It also offered up a few good keywords for the piece that could help me improve it down the line, along with a summary that I'd best describe as a bit of a jumble.
Not perfect by any means, but one benefit of my experiment is that Articoolo will learn from it, Tal says.
"Most of our [quality assurance] activity is about the quality of rephrasing," he explains. "We try to intercept patterns of rephrasing mistakes and 'teach' the algorithm the correct phrasing it should have used."
Tal says that the company realizes is taking on a monumental task in trying to perfect this. "We still have a lot of work to do in order to reach perfection," he says.
Perfection is a weird word, though, and the term brings up some philosophical thoughts for me. Writing is stunningly imperfect and designed to be broken. In some ways, it creates a different problem than what computers are used to: math, a subject that isn't nearly as subjective as the written word.
The challenge for Articoolo will be not to strive for perfection, but to create something with the nuance of the written word but with the ability to gather information and present it in an effective way.
And it'll need to do so without getting too distracted by "beer girls." |